Manouchehr Mottaki was dismissed as foreign minister in the most humiliating way. His departure was announced while Mottaki was performing his duties abroad. He found out about it while in Senegal, like a classic coup. It may have been Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's revenge for Mottaki's tenacity. He hung on in the foreign ministry a good two years after rumours began circulating that he was finished, with the protection of the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei. It is not clear whether Mottaki's departure means he lost that patronage, or whether this represents a challenge to Khamenei.

Ali Akba Salehi, the head of the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran, and one of the country's several vice presidents, has been named caretaker minister in his place. It says something about Iran and its priorities for a nuclear physicist to get the top foreign policy job, even if it is temporary for now. The preservation of the nuclear programme has become the central organising principle of Iran's foreign policy.

On the other hand, Salehi is one of the few people in the shrinking circle of Iran's policy elite who has significant experience of life abroad. He studied at the American University in Beirut and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Western diplomats generally prefer dealing with him rather than the chief nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili (an expert on political thought in the Koran), because he speaks much better English and is less inclined to rant.

Salehi after all signed the "additional protocol" with the International Atomic Energy Agency in 2003 allowing more intrusive inspections, but then had to defend the decision on television back in Iran. Implementation of the protocol was suspended in 2006.

In the Wikileaks US cables from the mission in Vienna (which covers the IAEA), the general consensus of western diplomats there in 2009, when Salehi took over at the AEOI, was that he was a slick operator but relatively powerless.

All described Salehi as an intelligent and skilled interlocutor and prefer dealing with him than some other Iranian officials.

The US Vienna embassy added this:

Comment: Mission's experience on the Tehran Research Reactor negotiations does not give us any confidence that Salehi will be able to deliver cooperation on long outstanding issues.

The then head of IAEA safeguards, Olli Heinonen, took a similar view.

Currently, Heinonen summed up, he cannot be sure about Salehi's level of influence in the regime and with the president, and said while it is clear that Salehi is "good at speaking," it's not clear whether he can "deliver."

Western diplomats, however, are generally cheered by the appointment because it might mean that their contacts with the foreign ministry will now have more substance. During the prolonged sparring between Mottaki and Ahmadinejad, the ministry increasingly became an empty shell, bypassed over major decisions, and irrelevant on the nuclear dossier.